Successful Onboarding For Finance Business Partners

In any job, it’s important to get a good start. One where you impress the hiring manager and the people you work with (be it, colleagues or business stakeholders). However, I’d argue that it’s even more important for business partners because the relationship-building starts from day one. Make a poor impression and you’ll struggle to gain the trust of your stakeholders. Make an outstanding impression and you’re influencing their decision-making already a few weeks into the job. What a difference a day makes!

To help you get a fantastic start in your new business partner role let’s then talk about how to successfully onboard the role. We’ll do that by me sharing how I did it when I started a new business partner role on 1 January 2019. Are you ready? 

The two onboarding tracks 

As a business partner, you’re typically part of two teams. The finance team and the business team and you surely have business stakeholders to support. Likely your new manager will have set up an onboarding program for you to follow.

This program is important because it’ll get you around to meet people. More importantly, it’ll help you learn about the systems and processes that you’ll use in the role. Sometimes you’ll even get the opportunity to observe the person previously in the role how (s)he’s been doing things.

There’s a second track to the onboarding though. The unofficial one. Here you on your own set up individual meetings with your new business stakeholders. These meetings are much needed to get their view on the challenge ahead of you. What challenges are they facing, how do they view the finance function (and the support they’re getting), and what key priorities would they like you to get working on.

These conversations are typically where you get a real view as to what’s important and what’s not. This is where you’ll get some input you can use later to impress your stakeholders by showing that you listened and understood their needs even they weren’t expressed directly.

Both tracks must be followed intensely as they both hold valuable information you need to succeed in the role and to build trust with your stakeholders. 

Here’s how I did it 

Firstly, I had the advantage of watching my predecessor in action and get a soft start in my role as an observer for the first 1,5 months. That means I could reacquaint myself with the tools and processes as I had partly used some of them before. Same time I scheduled informal lunches with my main stakeholders to get their view on the lay of the land. Each of the meetings gave me good insights into what I needed to do once I started the role.

One of the key challenges I observed was that we were too far removed from driving business actions. Instead, we would speak only with financials and be entrenched in heavy budgeting and forecasting processes. That had left the business stakeholders to do their own business performance management. It also left us without an effective way to explain performance because all we had were financial effect calculations. Then we would need to go and ask our stakeholders every month what had happened (when we should’ve known ourselves).

To change this, I introduced monthly business performance reviews with each of my product managers not showing their financials but showing the results of their strategy and tactical initiatives. Essentially year they would try to answer the questions of “Where to Play” and “How to Win” but lacked the answer to the question “Are we Winning”. That’s what the business performance review would answer. Looking at each of their initiatives we would discuss how they were doing. If they were behind what could be done to get the plan back on track. If they were ahead could we do more and if we just didn’t see any results we’d discuss if we needed different initiatives.

There’s one key difference between a business review and a financial review. Instead of telling them how they perform on financials that Finance has derived based on their business plan I was now telling them how they were performing on their own actions that they had said they needed to win. That makes performance talks much clearer. In addition, I also changed the financial review because I now had more business insights which gave us a better understanding of why our results came out the way they did.

There were more changes along the way, of course, but introducing the business performance review was the key change I did as part of my onboarding. It completely changed the conversations we were having with our stakeholders. It gave them insights they could use to take immediate action so it both improved decision-making and business performance.

How do you normally experience on-boarding? Do you leverage it to get a head start on doing well in the role or just see it as a pain to get through? As a business partner, you must make a strong impression from the first day. Otherwise, you’ll face an uphill battle for success in the role. If you’d like to share your experiences as part of this series just leave a comment or send me a message. I’m sure finance professionals around the world are eager to learn from your story too!

This was the second article in the series “Business Partnering Lessons From The Trenches”. You can read previous articles below.

Business Partnering Lessons From The Trenches

You can read a lot more articles about FP&A, Business Partnering, and Finance Transformation below. It all start's with “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” where you set the ambition for your transformation. You should join the Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Why Did You Become A Business Partner - Ranu Sharma

Your Journey To Successful Business Partnering Explained

How To Create Value Through Business Partnering

Everyone Can Adopt A Business Partnering Mindset (part of a six-article series about FP&A Business Partnering)

From Business Partner To Working Within The Business (part of an article series where I interview finance professionals about their careers in FP&A and Business Partnering)

Is Your Product Optimized For Value Creation? (part of a toolbox series where we look at what tools FP&A professionals should leverage to drive value creation)

How Business Partners Turn Analysis To Insight (part of case study series where I interview business partners about how they drive value creation using real cases)

The Future Of FP&A: Two Ways To Take The Reins

What Is The Accounting Profession Paradox?

What Defines A Finance Master?

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How To Become A Finance Business Partner

Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner

Finance Business Partner Is A Bullshit Job

How Business Partners Keep A Plan On Track

Anders Liu-Lindberg is a Senior Finance Business Partner at Maersk supporting our largest product and I have more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. I am also the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 7,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to show how to be successful with business partnering and drive value creation as a trusted partner. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 36.000+ followers.